How To Reduce PDF File Sizes [Tutorial]

Since PDF files don’t allow further editing of the text or images they contain, they are a great format to share documents and forms online. Sending important documents via e-mail or uploading them to a website for further sharing is the norm by now.

However, if you embed a lot of different images like graphics, charts and photos, clipart and illustrations to a PDF, the file size is significantly high. Especially for PDF documents with many pages.

Luckily, large PDF files can be reduced in file size by a simple compression of the whole file.

[EDIT] We have improved our compression function! This tutorial was, of course, updated to the current and improved state!

Compress PDF Documents

PDF2Go provides an easy way to compress a PDF and thus decrease the file size, making it easier, faster and more convenient to share a PDF online.

This reduction is done by decreasing the quality of the images contained in the PDF. To make a PDF file smaller, you don’t have to play with different settings of the images, but can easily make use of our presets:

Insane

Minimum

Screen

eBook

Printer

Prepress

Depending on the preset you choose, the quality of your PDF and the images contained in it will be changed, thus having a distinct impact on the file size of the PDF.

How Effective Is The File Size Reduction?

To answer this question we have run a test. The subject is a PDF with 242 pages, containing images. The file size of the PDF is 1.35 MB.

Preset used: eBookResult: 692 KB

We didn’t even have to use the preset with the lowest quality and already achieved a very high compression and thus file size reduction of the PDF. From 1,350 KB to 692 KB means we actually reduced the file size by 49%.

How To Reduce A PDF’s File Size

With this in mind, let’s have a look at how to compress your PDF file: